Raccoons are the Original Pirates

Most movies are terrible. People shouldn't waste their time watching them. Nonetheless, there is the occasional thing on DVD that’s worth watching, and if it’s worth watching once, it’s probably worth having a copy in case something happens to the original. Experienced raccoonists are prepared for anything, including loss or damage of their DVD collection.

That brings us to the topic of copying DVDs. DVD writing drives come with most new computers or can be purchased for a modest amount. Blank DVDs are now commonly available and typically cost about $2. Cost effective! There are two competing formats of writable DVDs, DVD+R and DVD-R. For the time being you probably want to use DVD-R, as this is compatible with older DVD players.

Unfortunately, most computers don’t come with software that can copy the contents from a DVD. I’m not sure exactly why this is. Fortunately, several excellent programs for this purpose can be found on the internet. DVD Decrypter is an excellent program that will copy the contents of a DVD to your hard disk. The simplest way to do this is to save the ISO the DVD, which can then be burnt to DVD simply. This makes a copy of the entire contents of the DVD into a file on the hard drive. Alternatively, you can copy the individual files from the DVD to a folder on your hard drive. This is useful if you have to modify the contents of the disk.

Once you have the ISO, many programs such as Roxio or Nero can burn this ISO to one or many writable DVDs.

The typical $2 writable DVDs can store up to 4.7 GB of data, which corresponds to about two hours of video. Longer movies are typically stored on dual layer DVDs, which can store up to 8.5 GB of data. There are a handful of solutions to this. If your DVD burner can burn dual layer DVDs (you can find this out from the website of the manufacturer of your DVD burner), you can buy writable dual layer DVDs and simply burn the larger ISOs to them. The problem with this is that these typically cost 4 times more than single layers DVDs.

Another solution is to shrink the size of DVDs to fit on a single disk. Most commercial DVD burning programs will do this automatically by compressing the video, which is generally ok, but it reduces the picture quality.

DVD Shrink is a program designed to shrink the space needed to store the DVD’s data. It can compress video to fit on shorter disks, but you can also use it to remove useless stuff, like those commercials at the start of a disc or FBI warnings. Simply use DVD Decrypter to copy the files from the DVD to a folder on your hard drive and use DVD shrink to eliminate the stuff you don’t want. This will let you bring the length of the DVD down to the size you can put on a single layer DVD.

Following this procedure, you can feel safe knowing that you’ll always have a copy of a DVD, even if the original is destroyed in the struggles or returned to the store.

An excellent website on this topic is Doom9 (http://www.doom9.org/). They deserve raccoonist praise for providing this resource and making good use of the word doom, which is an awesome word.